Richard H.K. Vietor

Professor Vietor is Baker Foundation Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He teaches courses on the international political economy. Before coming to the Business School in 1978, Professor Vietor held faculty appointments at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Missouri at Columbia. He received a B.A. in economics from Union College (1967), an M.A. in history from Hofstra University (1971), and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pittsburgh (1975). He has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, the Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Business History, and the Newcomen Award in Business History.

Professor Vietor's research on business and government policy has been published in numerous journals and books. His books include Energy Policy in America Since 1945 (1984), Strategic Management in the Regulated Environment (1989), Contrived Competition: Regulation and Deregulation in America (1994), Business Management and the Natural Environment (1996), Globalization and Growth: Case Studies in National Economic Strategies (2004), Environmental Protection and the Social Responsibility of Firms (ed. with Bruce Hay and Robert Stavins; 2007), How Countries Compete: Strategy, Structure, and Government in the Global Economy (2007), and The Class Moves the World: How Business Elites Decipher the World Economy (available in Japanese only, 2010).

For his courses in business-government relations and environmental management, Professor Vietor has published more than one hundred and sixty case studies on energy policy, the regulation of natural gas, nuclear power and hazardous wastes; on strategy and deregulation in airlines, railroads, telecommunications, and financial services; and on the national development strategies of a dozen countries. He has been a consultant to the Energy Research and Development Administration, serves on the Advisory Boards of IPADE (in Mexico), IESE (in Spain), and INALDE (in Colombia), and is a panel member of the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia International Advisory Panel, the Advisory Council of the Australia China Business Council, and several firms. He is a consultant to several corporations and to the Prime Minister of Malaysia.

Professor Vietor and his wife Cindy have three adult children -- Nicholas, Christopher, and Meredith.

As the world globalizes, countries compete for the markets, technologies, and skills needed to raise their standards of living. These strategies can make--or break--the government's efforts to drive and sustain growth. In How Countries Compete, Richard Vietor sheds light on ways in which governments can best set direction and provide a healthy climate for a nation's economic development and profitable private enterprise. Drawing on history, economic analysis, and interviews with executives and officials around the globe, Vietor provides concentrated examinations of different approaches to government facilitation of development. Individual chapters focus on the unique social, economic, cultural, and historical forces that shape governments' approach to economic growth. Countries discussed include: China, India, Japan, Singapore, the United States, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. Vietor challenges the widespread notion that, in market-driven economies such as the United States, a strong government can only hinder business success. A provocative resource, How Countries Compete offers potent insights into how the business environment has evolved in crucial nations--and what its trajectory might look like in the future.